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How Lufthansa uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

In a recent study looking at the world’s most social brands, four out of the top five were from the travel sector.

German airline Lufthansa came in third place, so it seems like a good case study for our series of posts looking at how different brands use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.

Lufthansa actually publishes its social media policy online, however it doesn’t appear to have been updated in a while as it links to Twitter feeds that no longer exist.

So here’s a look at how it uses the four main social networks. This post follows on from similar articles focusing on Walmart, Nike, Coca-Cola and Starbucks...

Facebook

Lufthansa currently has 1.2m Facebook fans and updates its page on an almost daily basis.

The social team posts a decent variety of content, including competitions, images of planes, its adverts and more recently a load of photos of Bayern Munich as they travelled to and from the Champions League final.

Large images of planes in flight tend to be the most popular posts, aside from the football photos, and attract around 5,000 ‘likes’ each.

In comparison, the recent competition posts only received a few hundred ‘likes’ which demonstrates the continued popularity of visual content on Facebook.

The competition the airline is currently promoting offers entrants the chance to win tickets to Croatia, an iPad mini and discounts flights.

As is normal with these kind of competitions it requires access to all your personal data if you want to enter, plus you have to first ‘like’ the brand as “only Lufthansa Facebook fans are eligible to win prizes.”

I wasn’t quite willing to open up to Lufthansa so I’m not sure what the competition involves, but the prizes are certainly attractive enough to lure in a few extra fans.

It follows on from a similar competition that Lufthansa ran last September where people had to submit photos of themselves lying down in awkward positions to try and win a business class flight to Europe.

The aim was to promote the fact that Lufthansa business class has beds that lie totally flat, and the airline was clearly impressed enough with the results that it decided to run another competition this year.

One other Facebook campaign worth noting is a project it ran in partnership with Nivea that aimed to highlight romantic and amusing long-distance love stories.

People had to upload their story plus a photo to Lufthansa’s Facebook page to automatically receive a promotion code for their next flight, while there were also three Lufthansa flights up for grabs.

Lufthansa is one of the few brands I've looked at that also uses Facebook as a customer service tool. For example, it recently posted an update to let its customers know about a strike that was impacting its flight schedule, then responded to customer queries in the comments.

It’s a great example of a company using social as a two-way communication tool, rather than just broadcasting messages then ignoring any responses.

Twitter

In comparison to its huge number of Facebook fans Lufthansa has surprisingly few Twitter followers, though this could be due to the fact that it has separate feeds for different markets.

Lufthansa Group and Systems are updated on an almost daily basis while the other two are basically dormant, but even the active pages achieve a bare minimum of interactions with just one or two +1s per post.

A number of brands I’ve looked don’t make much effort with G+ so it’s no surprise that Lufthansa doesn’t appear to see any value yet, but it is interesting to note that it hasn’t even claimed its brand name yet.

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Comments (5)

When you use our social media services, you’ll be able to see where the conversations relevant to your brand are taking place, what people are saying about your brand, how your brand could best get involved, and the tactics you should use to raise awareness of your brand in the social space. This low-cost method has a potential to draw large number of visitors to your website again and again. If you are like professionals, who don’t feel they have time to focus on social media, leave the fuss to OVOC Socialx. Visit our site: http://ovocsocialx.com/social-media-marketing.html

When you use our social media services, you’ll be able to see where the conversations relevant to your brand are taking place, what people are saying about your brand, how your brand could best get involved, and the tactics you should use to raise awareness of your brand in the social space. This low-cost method has a potential to draw large number of visitors to your website again and again. If you are like professionals, who don’t feel they have time to focus on social media, leave the fuss to OVOC Socialx. Visit our site: http://ovocsocialx.com/social-media-marketing.html

I feel there is an astonishing amount of sugarcoating on the LH social media, but when you look at what people who post on their FB pages and how LH responds, I feel this one is not an isolated case at all.

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